Profile Quota Problems; An SMS 2.0 Heads Up

No NT Option Pack News
Last week, I asked readers whether they knew about any Windows NT Option Pack updates for Service Pack 6a (SP6a), and I’m sorry to report that I didn’t get much feedback. A couple of you sent URLs, but after I booted two different Windows 2000 roots on two different physical drives (with nothing shared between the roots), Outlook overwrote my mail file, and I lost all of last week’s messages. Until I figure out why that happened, I promise to read mail only while running my usual Win2K Server configuration. And if I hear about any Option Pack updates, I'll pass them along right away.

Troubleshooting Profile Quota Problems
If you use the Limit Profile Size system policy to restrict the size of your NT user profiles and you have problems with profile management, you might want to install the checked version of the Profile Quota Manager utility, proquota.exe, from the checked build of NT. You can find the file in the \winnt\system32 directory. After you install the checked version of the utility, you must add a value to the Registry's Winlogon key to instruct the utility to generate a log file.

To install the checked version, rename the proquota.exe file proquota.old. Make sure the checked version of proquota.exe matches the version of the OS you're using, and then copy the file to the \winnt\system32 directory on the computer you want to troubleshoot. Open a Registry editor (e.g., regedt32.exe) and go to the Winlogon key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. Create a new value, ProquotaDebugLevel:REG_DWORD, assign it a hexadecimal value of 10002, and reboot the machine. The checked build generates a text log file called proquota.log at the root of your C drive that should help you identify your profile problem. Microsoft Support Online article Q259826 (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q259/8/26.asp) describes this technique.

SMS 2.0 Heads Up
When I checked the Knowledge Base recently, I noticed many new articles about Systems Management Server 2.0 (SMS 2.0). If you have problems with SMS 2.0 or are planning to upgrade to the new version, check out these references. With the exception of perhaps 10 articles, all are new within the past 2 weeks. Several contain how-to information, but most of the new postings describe bugs and problems with clients (NT and Windows 95), remote control, inventory, and installation.